John G. Feild Oral History Interview JFK #1, 1/16/1967 Administrative Information

Transcription

1 John G. Feild Oral History Interview JFK #1, 1/16/1967 Administrative Information Creator: John G. Feild Interviewer: John F. Stewart Date of Interview: January 16, 1967 Place of Interview: Washington, D.C. Length: 38 pages Biographical Note Field ( ) was a government official, and the Executive Director for the President's Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity from In the interview Feild discusses the 1960 Democratic National Convention, 1960 Presidential campaign, the President s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and Plans for Progress, among other issues. Access Open. Usage Restrictions According to the deed of gift signed January 8, 1991, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. Users of these materials are advised to determine the copyright status of any document from which they wish to publish. Copyright The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excesses of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form. Direct your questions concerning copyright to the reference staff. Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the Library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.

2 Suggested Citation John G. Feild, recorded interview by John F. Stewart, January 16, 1967, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

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4 John G. Feild JFK #1 Table of Contents Page Topic 1 The Area Redevelopment Act 2 Labor legislation, the amendments to the Taft-Hartley Act 2 Civil Rights legislation 3 Building support from the delegates for John F. Kennedy s [JFK] presidential campaign 4 Meeting with Negro Democratic Party leadership 5, 7 Campaign strategies 6 The involvement of Louis E. Martin as advisor to JFK s presidential campaign 6 The West Virginia primary 7 The issue of religion during the 1960 campaign 9 Stories from the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, CA 12 Working on the civil rights section of the campaign 14 Program development process for Civil Rights matters during the transition period after the 1960 election 16 Process and decisions involved in recruiting personnel to hold government positions involving civil rights 17 Drafting the executive order which would create the President s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity 20 Events leading up to Feild being appointed to the President s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity 22 Budget problems encountered by the President s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity 28 Plans for Progress program 32 How Plans for Progress agreements were enforced 35 The Civil Service Commission and Feild s thoughts on John W. Macy Jr.

5 Oral History Interview With John Feild January 16, 1967 Washington, D.C. By John F. Stewart For the John F. Kennedy Library Why don t we begin, Mr. Feild, by my asking you when did you first meet President Kennedy [John F. Kennedy] or any members of his staff? My first acquaintanceship with President Kennedy occurred in I came to the Senate as a staff member working for newly elected Philip A. Hart from Michigan. We were rather rapidly drawn into associations with Senator Kennedy and his staff, Mike Feldman [Myer Feldman] and Ted Sorensen [Theodore C. Sorensen], on a variety of legislative matters before the Senate. So my original relationship stems from that period. That was the beginning of Going on from then Do you remember what particular piece of legislation you had Well, we had a number of bills of interest to us. I was working also with two committee staff members that were close to Senator Kennedy: Ralph Dungan [Ralph A. Dungan] on the Labor Committee, and there was another staff member working for Senator Douglas [Paul H. Douglas], Bob Wallace [Robert Ash Wallace], who was also working rather closely with Senator Kennedy because he had been instrumental in sponsoring what was at the time called distressed areas legislation and later became known as the Area Redevelopment Act. We were very

6 concerned about economically distressed areas; we had very high unemployment in Michigan in We were working very closely with Senator Douglas, and because of the New England situation on which Senator Kennedy had given so much leadership, we were very close to him. Later on, as that particular session of Congress wore on, we also had occasion to be very closely involved with him on the labor legislation, the amendments to the Taft-Hartley Act. He became the floor leader on that legislation. We, of course, were very much involved in that in part because Senator McNamara [Patrick V. McNamara] from Michigan was very much identified with that [-1-] legislation and with the problems involved in it. So we had almost daily relationships with this staff and with him and with other key personnel that he brought down to help him with that legislation. The later Solicitor General Cox [Archibald Cox] was very much involved in that labor legislation at that time. What were your impressions of Kennedy s office at that time, the operations of the staff and so forth? Well, they were very selective about the issues in which they became involved. Once they became publicly committed to an area of interest, whether it was distressed economic area legislation or labor legislation or, to a somewhat more limited extent, some of the foreign affairs debates, they proceeded to deal with this in great depth. The amount of homework, the amount of backgrounding, the amount of collateral involvement that they solicited from persons who they felt would be competent was, to me, surprisingly extensive. I hadn t known the Kennedy group before that experience, and I became rather quickly impressed with their focused concern about those issues that they were involved in. Beyond those, they seemed to have practically no interests. We had great difficulty in the early part of that session in getting Senator Kennedy involved in our deep concerns about civil rights legislation. He did not feel this issue sharply; he did not have great pressures on him from his own constituency; he was very quick to say so. He was generally sympathetic, but it was not an area upon which he was prepared to make any extensive commitment. He preferred to leave those areas as grey, sort of undetermined areas. One certainly could not say that he was hostile to this area or anti; one would have to say that he was interested, but not very much interested. Did people one his staff speak openly about picking and choosing these issues in relation to the campaign that was coming up because, of course, by 1959 there was no doubt as to where he was going? Yes, they were very conscious of this. They were very conscious at all times of the national import of any particular legislative item. None of these items were ever viewed parochially. I mean, there was to some extent a New England identification, but more frequently they were looked upon as what

7 bearing they would have upon national constituencies and national groups. Could you briefly describe your role, and I assume the role of Senator Hart, politically before the convention in 1960? Well, let me just give you a little piece of background from my perspective. We all were from Michigan. We had [-2-] come out of a party situation where in 1948, which was ten years prior to Phil Hart s going to the Senate, every major office in that state was held by a Republican. In that year only one statewide Democrat was elected, G. Mennen Williams. In the succeeding ten years, the Democratic Party situation in Michigan had been transformed into one in which every major statewide office was held by a Democrat. So we had come from a party with great solidarity and unity of purpose and highly flavored with the ideological and liberal and personal bents of the Governor. The Governor in 1958 was beginning himself to entertain national aspirations and was sounding people out around the country about leadership in the party. There was enormous disaffection from the congressional leadership which, as you may remember, was then headed by the Majority Leader in the Senate and the Speaker in the House, both of whom were Texans. The Democratic Advisory Council was an area of great ideological interest from our perspective. So that we were, as party politicians from Michigan and as persons connected with the Senate, looking at the national political scene in terms of the alternatives that were likely to be available, that would present potentials for either advancing our own conception of what the party ought to be or, if the governor decided that he was in fact going to make a major break for the presidential nomination, there would be no question about our loyalty or our commitment. As those events unfolded, to make the story rather compressed, Governor Williams was the first Democratic governor apart from the old, loyal, New England friend, Governor Ribicoff [Abraham A. Ribicoff], he was the first non- New England governor to endorse Senator Kennedy s aspirations. Immediately after that our staff people were gradually released and asked to work in various portions of the Kennedy nomination drive. I was specifically released from my staff obligations to spend almost full time with the Kennedy campaign group. The assignment was to do everything possible to enlist delegate support for Kennedy. In fact, I worked principally under Sarge Shriver [R. Sargent Shriver Jr.]. Harris Wofford [Harris L. Wofford Jr.] and Marjorie Lawson [Marjorie M. Lawson] were the codirectors along with Congressman Dawson [William L. Dawson] of the so-called civil rights unit. This is an area in which I had had long professional and political identification. So I began to spend all of the months in the spring going into the summer of 1960 on the campaign. We worked rather closely in the early stages with Bob Wallace, whom we had known from Senator Douglas staff and who had worked with us on other matters, doing an analytical job on state party organizations. Those of us who had some relationship with other states were asked to help on it. I

8 had worked in Minnesota and had worked in Ohio with those governors on fair employment legislation. I knew something about the politics of those states and so I worked with Bob on those, just providing him with background information while we concentrated on civil rights organizations and Negro organizations and generally those organizations interested in ethnic relationships. We had an awful [-3-] lot to do in Michigan with the Minorities Division of the National Democratic Committee, particularly the Advisory Council group, we worked pretty much largely through our relationships in the Democratic Advisory Council and the minority section. What were the big problems as far as Negro groups were concerned? Well, there was a very major problem. Jack Kennedy was not very greatly known as, and certainly wasn t admired as, an advocate for civil rights in that period. You may remember shortly after Governor Williams announced his support for Jack Kennedy s nomination for president, one of the things that we stages was a major meeting held over in the N Street house in Georgetown to which we brought down from Detroit somewhere between thirty and forty leading Negro Democratic Party leaders. In fact, the Caroline was sent out there, and we had so many people we wanted to bring out that we couldn t bring them all out on the President s plane. We had to bring some of them on commercial seats. We held a major confrontation, and that s about the word you d have to use for it because it s one of the earliest ones that Kennedy had with Negro Democratic Party leadership outside of his New England cronies. Generally the Negro leadership in our state regarded Jack Kennedy s New England friends, Negro friends, as cronies. They didn t regard them as being relevant to the national Democratic political scene at all; they didn t regard them as being aware of the labor relationships that were involved, much less the racial relationships. That meeting was a long, several hour, frank, candid discussion Mrs. Kennedy [Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis] was present, Harris Wofford, of course, and others from the Kennedy personal staff in which he was subjected to a considerable inquisition by Michigan Negro Democrats. This was after the so-called breakfast with Governor Patterson [John Malcolm Patterson], wasn t it? Yes, it was. There was great concern in our minds when I say our, I mean Governor Williams and others who had now made their commitment, who had publicly cast their lot as to where they were going to go in this upcoming Convention battle. And they had to give Jack Kennedy what they regarded as public credibility, that he had to make the commitments face to face in the smoke-filled room so that he could in turn translate this out into the public domain. We knew that the kind of political gossip, the kind of political intelligence that was spread from this meeting was going to be of great importance. Interestingly enough, the issue around which there was the hardest comment.jack

9 Kennedy quickly committed himself in an opening statement to the group as being favorable to fair employment legislation. And he was told almost forthwith [-4-] by that group that he ought to also be in favor of housing legislation, he ought to also be very much concerned about public accommodations in the South, about voting legislation, about economic opportunity in general, that you couldn t separate the civil rights issue into little convenient compartments. The basic reason for this was a fear that he was proposing an issue which had been sort of historically identified with President Truman [Harry S. Truman] and with the Democratic Party, and he was saying, Well, I m willing to go that far. The significant thing about that is that Kennedy never introduced fair employment legislation. When he came down later on, he had shifted in his orientation toward the issue as being somewhat more complex, and he was doing more with the overall national strategy of it. In that first meeting, my evaluation of him was that he was getting a very considerable exposure and education to this kind of pressure, what he was going to get a lot more of if he went out to Chicago or if he went to Los Angeles and he was confronted. I was present when he was later confronted by similar groups of Negro leadership, political leadership who were testing him, who were prodding him, who were forcing him to be explicit as to how he saw the Negro, race, civil rights leadership problem. He stood strongly; he was forthright; he was direct; he was not defensive, which I always admired. He was analytical. He would respond to the pushes and the prods by reiterating an analysis that he had assimilated. He knew what he was saying, and if he didn t know it, he didn t say it. If he was uncertain, he didn t hedge, he left it. He never said too much; he stopped just short of getting into areas about which he was not very well informed and with which he wasn t comfortable, he didn t know, to be frank. The meeting turned out to be a very considerable success. It was very widely treated in the national media and I think made a very considerable impact both on him, and he in turn in his capacity to begin picking up the themes that he had heard from these guys and using them as a sort of a basis of something he understood better. The decision was made fairly early, wasn t it, that people around him would not try to defend his vote on the 1957 civil rights bill? Right. Were you involved in this decision at all? Yes. There was a lot of discussion about this, and pretty early and pretty consistently. I think, interestingly enough, President Kennedy himself was always the decisive factor in these discussions, that what he had committed himself to, he had done because of the judgments that he had made. There was no purpose to be served by going into any extensive defensiveness. There was every purpose to be served by

10 [-5-] delineating a more comprehensive position which would be based upon sound and sufficient reasons for a new political posture. There was always the search for the new basis for a position, of rationalizing it, of providing it with argument, of providing it with a new level of understanding that made the difference. He refused to simply say, I ve got a new position. It had to be a new position that was developed pretty much sequentially and pretty much based upon a broader rationalization of why the problem was now different. In other words, there was an effort to say, I perceived the problem then because this is the way the problem was. There was a pretty strong personal participation by him in that process. I had a lot of experience in working on speech material with Harris Wofford, with Dick Goodwin [Richard N. Goodwin], with Louis Martin [Louis E. Martin]. Louis Martin had a great influence in that period. They brought him in quite early. We had an earlier relationship with Louis Martin in Michigan because he was the publisher of the Michigan Chronicle, the largest Negro weekly in the state. Louis never would tolerate excuse-making for earlier positions. His political advice was always in the direction, you ve got to have a better position, don t worry about the old one. Louis was a very important advisor to Bobby Kennedy [Robert F. Kennedy] and John Seigenthaler, and they spent many, many long hours trying to rationalize a better position rather than going back to old ones. Once that was settled, from then on it was a question of another principle, namely, don t promise too much. There was a great fear of over-promising, and again the President himself was very hard on this, don t promise too much. Mike Feldman very often would have to explain why the President wasn t going to be able to make that speech on the Senate floor or make that grandstand play somewhere even though it might be easy to do, to fight for an amendment that you really didn t think had a chance of passing. He would say, Look, if you don t think it s got a chance of passing, we ought to say so, and we ought to say where we stand. And they did. What was your role in the primaries, specifically Wisconsin and West Virginia? I was not involved in the Wisconsin primary at all. I did go out to West Virginia. We had a couple of interesting forays in West Virginia. There was a rather shrewd decision made, as the analysis of West Virginia proceeded, that West Virginia s problem was not going to be intensely racial. It was going to include that, but it was going to be more intensely the problem of economic development and economic opportunity. So the major investment that was made in terms of that primary campaign ideologically was to mount, with Adam Yarmolinsky s help and the Democratic Advisory Council personnel, who were by this time pretty well pulled into this, an urban affairs conference, an economic development conference. There were a series of these, one in Pittsburgh, et cetera. We did one [-6-] in Charlestown, West Virginia. This was an excellent way of involving the Democratic

11 leadership of that state on an affirmative, programmatic basis in the Kennedy interest and in exploration of it. This is the way most of the campaign activity was conducted. It was around economic issues, bread and butter, absolute bread and butter, the development of jobs and public welfare and free food and health services. It was all geared to that. The civil rights issue was only a part of it. Wasn t there some dispute within the campaign staff as to how much emphasis should be put on the civil rights area in West Virginia? Yes. Generally speaking, the way it came down was to be moderate. I don t really think there was very heavy, explicit campaign effort. In the television debates with Humphrey [Hubert H. Humphrey], he was challenged on this, and it was I think pretty early decided that when challenged, don t hedge, but push all the relationships, all the organizational contacts on economic grounds, which was I think pretty much the way it worked out. As it turned out, he did very well among Negro people in West Virginia. He did very well, but it was an area.the turf upon which that was being debated, the same appeals that you could make in that area, you were making them to poor people. And his willingness not to hedge publicly gave, I think, Kennedy the status with the Negroes that he needed. There was a certain indigenous understanding, he didn t have to be a bleeding heart about it. He was very straightforward about this and that gave him a lot of credibility, the willingness not to overplay it, not to make that mistake. religious issue. In your discussions with people during this period, how, if at all, did the religious issue tie in with the whole civil rights area? For example, there were some Negro ministers who were very concerned about the And how. They certainly were. Do you remember any specific examples of people that you talked to who I m trying to think of some specific.it was a theme that kept coming back quite often. We certainly encountered it in every big city. As I remember, Philadelphia, there s a large Negro Baptist church in Philadelphia that had a minister whose name is on the periphery of my memory, he s now living in New York, who had begun to raise [-7-]

12 the religious issue largely because of a lack of relationship or lack of involvement with the Kennedy group. This also probably reflected a little bit of the relationship of many Negro political people in Pennsylvania that were not unsympathetic to the Johnson group.they were not unsympathetic to the older, more conservative Truman ties and were very suspicious of this new crowd that had not really had any great history of liberal identification, they would raise the religious thing. They were raising it as much on religious innuendo as they would on race innuendo. It was a convenient thing. Louis Martin, I think, spent an awful lot of time on that problem in talking to Negro ministers. In fact, I would say this; we probably recruited an awful lot of Negro politicallyoriented ministerial leadership to take on some of this hard feedback talk on the religious grounds, and to use.basically the theme was, let s make the test civil rights, not Catholic- Protestant. The Protestant establishment is more against us than the Catholics ever have been. This kind of an argument would be fed into that discussion. Now, I m just talking about raw politics, not the way the argument went. It did come up very often. I don t really know how that issue got completely resolved except perhaps in the Texas speeches that Kennedy made which were widely observed by Negro Protestants. He achieved in the Negro religious communities the same acceptability on the religious problem as he had in neutralizing at least the white Protestant community. It s an area that, at least to my knowledge, hasn t been discussed or written about that much. No, it hasn t. The whole relationship, and I think it s a very interesting one. I think there was hardly a time we didn t encounter some tension from Negro Protestant ministers who were ambivalent. And they were ambivalent; there is just no question that they were ambivalent. [interruption] Well, I really don t have much more to say about that except that it was one of these issues and themes in campaign thinking that was running always with us. It was certainly less focused because we were very much focused on the civil rights issue. And great Negro leadership positions were being articulated at that time by Martin Luther King [Martin Luther King Jr.] as civil rights issues. He was not a party to any of the questioning about the other part of it, the religious side of it. So you had a clear enough road to go down without trying to deal with it. What was your function at the convention in Los Angeles? [-8-] Well, the Convention was a fascinating enterprise from several points of view, I think. During the campaign period, pre-convention, the socalled civil rights section under Sarge Shriver had become quite well organized. It was a fairly sizable group of people, by the way, either on loan or directly on

13 the payroll or as volunteers. Going into the immediate Convention period, all of the various specialized groups, whether it was the farm activity or whether it was Spanish-speaking, whether it was labor, were highly focused on state delegations. We had completed before going into the convention a detailed analysis of the composition of state delegations. The centralized work on this that was being done by Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O Donnell [P. Kenneth O Donnell] and Seigenthaler and all the others, and there were many, was very elaborate. They had excellent intelligence fed into them by the leaders of the state delegations that were pledged to them, and they had just as good intelligence fed into them by the minority leaders of the delegations that weren t pledged to them. There wasn t a delegation that we didn t know who were the definite on both sides or all three sides. Symington s [Stuart Symington II] people were very much in this, and the Stevenson [Adlai E. Stevenson] group was very much involved in it. We certainly knew who all the indefinites were. Our mission in the convention was to gain definiteness as to positions and information about delegate positions as rapidly as possible. So that our assignments were dispersed among state delegations that we had relationships with, that we could immediately identify and then work on by arranging for participation of the noncommitted or indefinite delegates to insure that they were present when major presentations were being made by either Kennedy directly or by some spokesman for him, or that they were put under some new relationship to the spokesman for the Kennedy people in their own delegation. Every morning for a week ahead of time as the delegations began to come in, we had a joke about it, we had our KKK Campaign, we called Koffee with the Kennedy Klan. It was a nose counting operation from beginning to end that had an overlay of strong, well thought through position pitch that had to be made. There wasn t a position by that time that had not been very well identified and laid out. Sorensen pretty much kept the focus in that arena, Larry O Brien [Lawrence F. O Brien] and Kenny O Donnell and Bobby pretty much at the delegate level Bobby more at state delegations rather than individual categories of delegates. I think the cutest anecdote that I would remember out of this: in the Michigan delegation we had a Negro dentist who had a half vote, who was a man of some means and a man of some importance, highly regarded, who had repeatedly expressed his disaffection with Kennedy and his admiration of Symington. My perception of this was that that would be an easier problem to deal with than if he had been a gung ho Stevenson supporter, which he wasn t. He was the president of the Urban League in [-9-] Pontiac, Michigan, and I felt we had some reasonable chance with his half vote. One morning I reported this, and somebody I don t know, Sarge or somebody said, What do we do to get this guy? I said, Well, he said to me if he could have a chance to talk with the man himself, as he put it, maybe he would change his mind. So we decided that we d try that. If you remember that hotel suite up there that the Kennedy forces occupied, that was one besieged and beleaguered piece of real estate. I was assigned to go find this guy, bring him back, and sweat out getting him through that schedule. I did find him, he was delighted,

14 he was very impressed about the invitation. He went over. Miss Lincoln [Evelyn N. Lincoln] was sitting in the bedroom with a table and her telephones and what not. And she was sort of a halfway doorkeeper with several other more important doorkeepers, notable the guy who s Chief Marshal today. McShane [James J. P. McShane]. Yes. McShane. By some process of alchemy the information was passed in, a note from me to so-and-so. After a reasonably short period of time, it wasn t too long, I would guess maybe an hour, Doc McNeill [H. H. McNeill] almost gave up. He was getting a little fainthearted. I think he was beginning to feel this was terribly presumptuous that he had to go into that room and sit down with this candidate and he had to be told what this man believed and what he said. But he stayed, and we went in. There were a few people in the living room of the suite, and a very gracefully and easily Jack Kennedy moved Doctor McNeill and I and he into a bedroom. He was sitting on the bed, Doc McNeill sitting in his chair. Doc had false teeth that didn t stick tightly, they always clicked. So he sat in this chair, and he was a little bit nervous anyway and his teeth were clicking a little bit more and he kept saying, But-but-but-but-but-but, Mr. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, I ve got to know how you feel on this issue. Jack Kennedy would give him a nice, direct response, clipped, to the point. He would ask another question, and it would take a little bit longer because his teeth kept slipping. Jack Kennedy would give him another quick, crisp answer and wait. Doc sort of hesitated, and Jack said to him, Is there anything more that you need to know from me? So Doc said, N-n-n-n-no. And then Jack sort of grasped his arm and he said, I need your help. I want you to know that. I think you and I both know how important these issues are that we re backing. I don t want to make any misstatement about other persons in this, but I ve told you where I stand, and if you think where I stand is the right place to stand, then I want you to help me. So he ushered Doc out and I go out with him. The press is out there waiting for everybody that issued from that suite and they said, Well, what were you in there for? He said, Well, I m just a delegate from Pontiac, Michigan. Well, what were you trying to do in there? He said, I was just in there to find out what Senator Kennedy s views were on the civil rights issue. They [-10-] said, Were you satisfied? He said, Well, I-I-I m going to think it over. Well, I ve got to give you the footnote; it s a great footnote. The first question I think I was asked when we did the big post mortem on how did these delegations come out was, Well, how did your guy go? I said, He voted for Symington. Oh, boy. After all that. After all that. But I think it was a marvelous measure of the willingness to be specific, to be direct, and to be, I think, very political in the commitments that you give, because I don t think he would have

15 hedged on Doc. If Doc had asked him a dirty question that he didn t answer or that he didn t feel he should he would have said, No. Were you primarily concerned with Michigan or were there other. Ohio, I was very much involved in because I had worked with Governor DiSalle [Michael V. DiSalle]. I spent four years in Toledo when Mike DiSalle had been mayor there just before my coming, and I felt very close to Mike DiSalle. In fact, I was very hopeful that Mike would have endorsed Jack Kennedy much earlier than he did. As you may know or may remember, he endorsed him very late and never with great enthusiasm. He was pressured into it by very strong pressures. Mike, I think, had a lot of history that people don t remember in his own aspirations to become National Democratic Committeeman and a lot of other battles that he had been involved in. So it wasn t an easy thing or him to turn his back on those who had supported him at one time in those strong battles. I think he was largely ignored by the Kennedys and they generally regarded him negatively because of that reluctance on his part. We spent a lot of time in Ohio going around him, never really dealing with him. Later on in the campaign itself I was back in Ohio three or four times and was never given any instructions to deal with Mike. Just deal with anybody out there that we had direct relationships with; county chairmen, individuals of prominence, particularly individuals who were willing to sponsor fund-raising and special interest activities for him. Mike DiSalle, I don t think, came off very well with the Kennedys. It was an unfortunate lack of relationship. I would have thought they would have every reason to be great political allies; they were a lot alike, very direct. It was just one of those things. I also did a little work in Chicago, of course, had a lot of friendships with political people there, and Minnesota and Wisconsin. This was during the Convention? Right. Talking with people in those delegations all [-11-] over. We had a lot of relationships in Michigan, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa. I had been executive secretary of the Governor s Committee on Civil Rights which had been organized by Harriman [William Averell Harriman] and Williams. The second chairman was Freeman [Orville Lothrop Freeman] from Minnesota. In fact, Freeman was chairman of that organization at that time and was Governor of Minnesota at that time. So I knew all of the Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan delegations. I knew them best and worked more closely with them than anybody else on the civil rights staff. In general, and this might be hard to really answer, how successful do you think your efforts were at the Convention? Naturally, your major emphasis was to hold what you already had and possibly pick up some

16 more. We had it won before we got there. Was there any real problem in holding what you already had? No. It was a net gain after we got there. Did you personally feel you picked up much? No. I personally felt that the area that we cut into most easily once we got there was the Stevenson group. By that time we had more people of substance politically. Yes. Yes. Why don t you briefly describe your role after the Convention and during the campaign, who else you worked with, what you. The civil rights section maintained its continuity throughout the whole campaign. I worked probably more closely with Louis Martin during that stage. I was sort of his backup person. He was negotiating extensively in the propaganda side with Negro newspapers and the media and the special literature that we were sending out literally by the baleful into community after community. It was largely a job then of consolidating relationships that we had and insuring that they had adequate material, they knew the line, they knew the scheduling, they knew the timing that would be involved in any given point when the campaign entourage would hit their community. It was a scheduling cycling problem almost entirely. We had a little bit of discussion at a few critical points about the Martin Luther King telephone call. I was on Harris Wofford s side all the way down to the wire on that. Harris was advocating that he (Kennedy) call Martin Luther King when he was jailed in Birmingham. And he did, he called Mrs. King [Coretta Scott King]. Those were a few little symbolic things in the [-12-] campaign strategy but nothing of any monumental importance. There was just a hell of a lot of hard scheduling work at that stage. I think the most important thing was.well, there were two prongs to it. We had Southern Negroes on the one hand and we had big city Negroes on the other that were the major targets of insuring adequate exposure of Kennedy to make known his views and to get the personal interaction. But in both instances we had really first-rate help from the friends. We had a little relationship with the Johnson group in the campaign. I had a little bit more than most on that because Bill Welsh [William B. Welsh], who worked for Senator Hart, was loaned to the Johnson vice presidential campaign team and did a lot of speeches for Johnson [Lyndon B. Johnson]. Our relationships were very good in that whole thing. When

17 Lady Bird [Lady Bird Johnson] made her train trip down through the South, the arrangements were easy, the speech line was well developed. We didn t have any problems. The line was the same. It was an affirmative line all the way through so that we didn t have any fears of being undercut on that point. It worked pretty well. It was just a lot of damn hard, slow moving work. I think once we got the campaign organizations at the local level clued into scheduling, clued into the line, clued into the materials, they produced damn well. It was a remarkably good operation. It was a big operation; it was from a technical standpoint, a monumental activity. Kenny O Donnell was a real genius in that, I think. He let all these sections know where the thing was going, and they in turn could fan out from there. Yes. Were you at all involved in the problems of defining Congressman Dawson s role in the campaign? I was present on several of those discussions, both with the Congressman, with his staff, and with the rest of the civil rights people in Sarge Shriver s group. I think the position that was taken, namely to be cordial, to be friendly, but to be in no sense dependent on that organization was a pretty sound one, and it was pretty quickly perceived by anybody who was interested in real politics. Paul Butler [Paul M. Butler] helped a great deal, and I don t know that Paul Butler ever got much credit for the help he rendered, I think, in making it easier for the Kennedy s to develop their own relationships with Negro political leadership. We were, as Kennedy people, invited by Butler to several strategic meetings involving Negro Democratic leaders who were called together from all over the country and were afforded the opportunity to participate in strong strategy discussions about campaign activity with them directly. Now this was, interestingly enough, pre-convention because post-convention Butler was out. Scoop Jackson [Henry M. Jackson] became the national chairman, and for all practical purposes at that point, you know, it was really taken over by the Kennedy group. [-13-] But, we had a tremendous number of relationships that were Kennedy identified that we were able to quickly bring into campaign planning discussions and weren t dependent on Dawson. It was very easy for Sarge to convey back to the central planning group, to Bobby and others, that we re just going to go around him. It was a little bit easier for Sarge in another way: he was a Chicagoan; he was known to Daley [Richard J. Daley]; he was involved in that process; and he could justify it on the grounds, Look, we ve got to have more push than that. There s not enough energy here and it s too parochial, and we ve got to do more. You also had a whole new breed of Southern Negro leadership coming along, and a new breed of Western Negro leadership coming along. We had Cecil Poole [Cecil F. Poole] and Andy Hatcher [Andrew T. Hatcher] coming out from the California group. They were helpful too, in their own name, demand attention which they weren t going to take from Dawson. That was my perception of how that was working. I think it was much resented by

18 the Dawson people. I think that they were very cool to the campaign effort. They were very reluctant to work very hard in the early stages. I did not perceive them as being all out. It may have been personal pique, it may have been lack of confidence, I don t know. Elmer Henderson was assigned to work over in our group; he occupied Congressman Dawson s office. He was given a special private little office which we had made with a partition around it so you d have some status, but they never did much. They were doing little things. They weren t in the big push in that campaign. Did you stay in Washington the whole time? Did you get out of the city at all? Except for trips to Ohio, Michigan, Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin. I don t think I was in Indiana, but I met with Indiana people in Chicago. Okay. Why don t we move on? As I said, if there are any other things, we can come back. After the election, what was your function during the transition period? Well, immediately after the election, Sarge Shriver and Adam Yarmolinsky and Ralph Dungan began to put together what later became known as the talent search. They borrowed temporarily a few of us to stay with that to see if we couldn t start to contribute to the planning on this, Harris Wofford, myself, Marjorie Lawson was less involved in that activity. She wasn t involved to my knowledge at all, maybe a little bit. I began more to work with Ralph Dungan and with Adam during that phase, but I was working also with Harris. We were beginning to think about executive organization for civil rights, what should we be doing. We had Bill Taylor [William L. Taylor], John Silard, and a number of others of us began to think and to write memoranda on what should the shape be of the executive and legislative [-14-] programs of the President. We were basically engaged in a sort of a program development process that would feed into the series of messages that was envisioned. It s interesting how short your memories are some times, but when I think about this and can go back and recollect something of the flavor of it, it was sort of imbued with the notion that we had to do as much in the first hundred days as we could. Neustadt s [Richard E. Neustadt] book was very much under discussion. There was a great feeling that the key problem would be to grasp the leadership of the federal branch, of the executive branch, and that it not only was necessary to grasp it in terms of appointments of high quality early, but to have sufficient preparatory work done so that the essential programmatic directions could be articulated early. I was working during that period on the question of the problems that had been involved in what were called the President s Committee on Government Contracts, the President s Committee on Government Employment Policy, the role of the Civil Rights Commission.

19 Berl Bernhard [Berl I. Bernhard] was involved in these discussions too at that stage, Bill Taylor the whole question of executive orders, the question of what later became Title VI in the civil rights legislation of 1964, that is, the use of federal moneys. And we began to do drafts of executive orders at that stage and drafts of political planning memoranda as to when appointments should be made, what kind of people did he want to have in these, what had to be done to insure adequate participation by Negro and civil rights organizations without tainting them with excessive political identity with Kennedy, enabling them to make their representations in a systematic way that could be given political consideration but not necessarily co-opt them. A lot of discussions were being held with Roy Wilkins and with Martin Luther King and with the Southern Regional Council. You know, Send to us now your recommendations as to what the executive branch ought to do and what the President ought to do about its organization. We were soliciting views and opinions. Some excellent monographs were prepared, by the way, and sent to us. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights under Roy Wilkins leadership enabled some sixty organizations to participate in an orderly process of recommending what they thought the federal branch, the executive branch ought to do. The question of the civil rights department in the Attorney General s office was very critical and very much under review. The Southern Regional Council submitted a major working paper to that process. So I was involved in almost daily discussions with somebody about what the programmatic line ought to be in the civil rights field and what the personnel side of it ought to be as well as the personnel for other functions of government that had high sensitivity to civil rights. There was a lot of concern about the Agriculture Department which had been notoriously Southern dominated, and this ought to be broken, and as you know, it was. It was a very interesting division. That pretty much consumed most of our time between November and the [-15-] opening of Congress. After Congress reopened, of course, I was still on Phil Hart s staff and our problem was to reestablish our own lines of leadership at that stage of the game. I did continue to spend about half of my time, however, working with Ralph Dungan and Harris Wofford. On recruitment. Yes. The recruiting problems and discussions about these recommendations on programs that were coming in. The appointments began to come in pretty quickly and the personnel began to fit into the structure of the government so you could pretty much see what was going to be the next stage of need. What types of people, or what types of jobs were you primarily involved in, and what were the biggest problems?

20 Well, most of them had to do with the personnel that were going to be involved in the public civil rights leadership positions in the government. That raised the question about the Civil Rights Commission. There were five appointees there; the question was, should the chairman continue? The chairman was a man from Michigan, the President of Michigan State University, John Hannah [John A. Hannah], and there was a question as to whether or not he should be asked to step aside. As you know, it was decided that he should not and he is still the chairman of that Commission. We knew that any new executive order that came out on employment and it was quite sure that there was going to be one, there wasn t any particular question about that was going to require citizen participation on some public committee. What kinds of people should they be and what representative flavor should they come from? There was a question of that caliber of personnel. There were questions about the White House Staff. Should the White House staff have a civil rights representative? Should it have a Negro representative? Frank Reeves [Frank D. Reeves] had been on the staff of the civil rights unit and been very important to it. He had been, as you may remember or not remember, one of the key people in the Humphrey campaign, and he had a lot of special identity because of this. He had very good credentials and relationships. Marjorie Lawson had been an older Kennedy supporter. A lot of hard choice had to be made as to who was going to end up at what points in connection around this damn business. The Attorney General s office was very, very important. They had a very large staff; it was early recognized that the caliber of that special staff and the lawyers there were going to be the key troubleshooters for the Attorney General. Who should they be? What background should they come from? How Negro could they be? How many Negroes, you know, could they have? You know, [-16-] the political discussions were going at a pretty fast clip during that period. What non-civil rights functions, would opportunities exist considering the qualifications and the degree of prestige that you needed for these jobs afford? How many key people in Negro leadership would be available for non-civil rights jobs? This became a problem at one time, didn t it, of It did indeed. presumably, drawing people away from key positions. It did indeed become a key problem and I think probably still is. The Negro lawyers were the most interesting group to speculate about because in many ways, there was no particular reason why they couldn t be asked to take on, as so many other white lawyers had been asked to take on, more general administrative leadership positions and become non-civil rights persons. This didn t happen, by the way, interestingly enough.

21 Weaver [Robert C. Weaver] was pretty much targeted on fairly early because of his preeminence in the housing field, and he held a current position of prominence in the field. He was, you know, a housing economist of stature. It was relatively easy to slot on him for that reason. It was a little more difficult to think of, you know, moving Hastie [William Henry Hastie] off of the bench into the mainstream of administrative action or switching gears on a Thurgood Marshall or pulling a Whitney Young [Whitney M. Young Jr.] out of Negro interest into public welfare interest. Whitney wasn t really on the scene at that time, the national scene. He was down in Atlanta at a school of social work then. You know, the thought, well, maybe you could make the move. There was a lot of talk about HEW [Health, Education, and Welfare] and the potentiality there. There were plenty of educators around. Were Negro colleges to parochial, and what was the caliber of these men? It was a very sifting process, and it was in the hands, by and large, of a group of people who were terrifically sympathetic to the need to publicly attract and place into these positions representative Americans from the constituency that supported Kennedy. I think probably on the whole that it was done at a little bit too low a level. The guys that were brought in came in too much at the sub-level or at the specialized civil rights level and not generally enough at the operating level. There was, however, a very strong feeling among Negro political leadership that there should be somebody with direct access to the White House. This is the pressure that ultimately produced Frank Reeves as a presidential assistant. Kennedy balanced that by naming Harris Wofford at the same time. Fortunately, Harris and Frank were very good friends, and they worked easily together. But it s significant that they didn t [-17-] want to have a Negro civil rights guy. Harris was expected to carry the cutting edge burden of civil rights as much as Frank. Frank was expected more to be concerned about Negro participations in the party and in the councils of discussion about politics, which was really a good flavor to put on him. Then he went out prematurely on a little problem that he encountered. But the process was one of trying to get participation internally and, at the same time, get some public posture on it, public appointments. That was basically, I think, the mission during that period. That period went on for a long time. It was very well into 1961 before those spots were pretty much cumulatively filled in. By the time we created the sub-cabinet committee on civil rights, which was an early administrative creature, it was largely the result of pretty much the same group of people that had worked with Harris Wofford in shaping programs, who said, Now that we ve got these guys scattered around the government in appointed spots, let s pull them together and let them know what direction they re supposed to be going. They were pulled together, and the President did address them and tell them, Now this is where we are going. These are the commitments we are going to make. That created a structure of leadership that enabled the Administration to continue in its programmatic posture once we had sixty guys appointed around the various bureaus. That was also very consistent, by the way, with the Kennedy method of operation. Yes.